The dragons have retreated back into their basement storage, and the crowds in your local Chinese restaurant have finally died down — sure signs that the two-week-long Asian party known as the Lunar New Year has come to a close.

But don’t put those chopsticks away. In fact, why don’t you invest in a rice cooker and wok too? It’s time to make good on that flailing New Year’s resolution to eat healthy — and Chinese food, cooked and eaten authentically, can effortlessly get you back on track.

Japanese cuisine has dominated the health headlines for many years. And experts point out that Korean food is quite healthy too. But do you know how obscenely expensive sushi-grade fish is? Can you really count on your local Stop & Shop to carry Korean chili-pepper paste and dried anchovies? Chinese food, in contrast, isn’t precious. Its staples are available anywhere and make for a healthy, diet-conscious, portion-controlled meal. Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, author of many Chinese cookbooks, including Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking, points out that as little as three-quarter pounds of chicken cut into strips, stir-fried with a few cups of broccoli and served with steamed rice will serve four to six people. Try divvying up that same amount of grilled chicken breast Western style and chances are your guests will scoff, even if you’ve fixed up a couple of side dishes.

Chopsticks — which place far smaller bites in your mouth than a fork or spoon — may help keep portions down too. A 2008 Cornell University paper reported that healthy-weight guests at a Chinese buffet were three times likelier to eat with chopsticks than obese guests. Brian Wansink, the study’s lead author, has also observed that chopsticks users go back to the buffet table fewer times. “Chopsticks help people slow down,” he says. And when you slow down, your body’s satiety signals are given time to do their job.

Soup — a mainstay of any authentic Chinese family dinner — is also a satiety promoter. As Barbara Rolls, a Penn State psychologist and author, most recently of The Ultimate Volumetrics Diet, points out, eating a broth-based soup before a meal can reduce food intake by about 20%. Last fall, a European Journal of Clinical Nutrition paper suggested that this is because soups — particularly the smooth sort — take longer to leave the stomach than solids.

“But what about the white rice?” you might ask. True, the bowls are brimming. “But they’re also miniscule!” says Wansink, who, of course, is exaggerating, but only a little. The bowls I stole from my childhood home are utterly dwarfed by my Crate and Barrel purchases. No more than 100 or so calories of rice fit into them. And even if you go back for seconds, you probably won’t eat as much as if you started out with a larger bowl. “We tend to let exterior cues dictate how much we eat,” says Wansink, who later this year will be publishing Slim by Design, a follow-up to his successful first consumer book, Mindless Eating. (He also points out that plates in Chinese restaurants are about 9.5 in. to 10.25 in., as opposed to the standard 12-in. plate in most Western restaurants.)

If you can go with brown rice, more power to you. But it’s nice to know that with Chinese food, you’re eating loads of vegetables, ginger and possibly mushrooms with your carbs. More importantly, the meat will lower your glycemic load, and the fibers in your greens will keep your blood-sugar levels balanced. This means a more sustained feeling of fullness and energy, says Kantha Shelke, A food scientist at Corvus Blue, a nutritional-technology think tank in Chicago.

If you cook and eat Chinese food authentically, you will also see why past reports about the mind-blowing salt and calorie content of Chinese takeout dishes misunderstand the cuisine. Yes, orange crispy beef has 1,500 calories — but it’s an atypical dish. The vast majority are steamed or lightly stir-fried, points out Farina Kingsley, the half-Chinese author of several Asian-themed Williams-Sonoma cookbooks who recently developed a Chinese-cooking app. Chinese recipes rarely call for more than two tablespoons of oil and soy sauce, and the oil is usually heart-healthy peanut oil.

According to Shelke’s calculations, if you cooked chicken breast authentic-Chinese style five days a week instead of American style, that would reduce your dinner each night by about 125 calories just through portion control alone. That’s 32,500 calories in a year — or almost 10 lb. by the time the Lunar New Year festivities roll around again. Now that’s something worth dragon dancing about.

The rates of diabetes and related metabolic conditions among aging Chinese are the same now as in NYC, and that is with traditional diet. Much of the food is fatty, the diets are high in sodium and cooking quickly at high temperatures is not particularly healthy.

Perhaps a modified form of Chinese (or any cuisine) has attractions. Many of the benefits of diet are seen with higher seafood diets in Mediteranean countries and Japanese islands, not with typical inland diets in China.

As a wok cooking teacher, it's frustrating that many associate 'Chinese' restaurant food as 'authentic' but has NOTHING to do with home cooking and give us a bad reputation! Those deep fried foods, greasy, salty chop suey dishes with goopy sauces and ridiculous names are so commercialized, it's painful. If you want GOOD food with Asian flavors, you can make it yourself easily at home with a few fresh ingredients and only 4 seasonings, a good wok and gas stove for high heat and control and some good technique.

The paragraph about chopsticks is just plain silly. Anyone who has grown up using them knows that they neither slow you down, nor cause you to place smaller bites in your mouth. Only people who are not used to them would have those problems. I know from ample experience that the fastest eaters in the world are young Asian men using the "put your rice bowl up to your mouth and shovel" method. They can't be beat.

I read somewhere that the "Chinese" food we know here in the US was invented by the men who came over from China to work on the railroads. They had never had to cook for themselves before (they didn't bring their wives) and pretty much invented a new style of cuisine.

A lot of dishes aren't even known in China. Like General Tso chicken. They went to the general's ancestral village, and no one's heard of it.
You have got to watch this funny video about Chinese food in America. It's a TED talk.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6MhV5Rn63M

Denesius the author is pointing out that AUTHENTIC Chinese food is very different from that served in ubiquitous Chinese takeout restaurants. There is far less sodium and grease. "Chinese style chicken" refers to the way chicken is being sliced - specifically, the meat is sliced or shredded in very thin strips. Therefore you use less chicken (1/2 lb vs. 1 lb) in one dish (for example, a stir fry with lots of vegetables) than compared to "American style" which is generally cut into larger pieces. If you haven't tried so already, I highly encourage you to explore an authentic Chinese restaurant - ask and bring a Chinese friend to come along. Many of the authentic dishes only come in Chinese menus (if you are American they give you the American menu).

Fatty from the use of skin & associated tissues, lots of fried compliments, unbelievable levels of sodium, loads of flavor enhancers such as MSG. How anyone can refer to Chinese food as healthy is beyond me. I love the vague sentence 'Chinese style chicken compared to American'. What are you comparing to, KFC?